locating external drive on mac?
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- lvl_13
So I have an external drive (fat32 formatted I believe) and I can see it on my pc.
when I plug it into my mac, it came up the first time. i was able to view files and everything, then came across one folder and it froze up. I restarted my mac, unplugged the drive, re-plugged it in. The red light on the drive lights up, but then nothing. the mac doesn't show anything. any ideas?
even if it is not reading the drive (apparently) is there a way to see if the drive is even showing up on my mac (even if it's not reading it)? does that make sense? i know how to view all drives on a pc, even if it isn't regestering as a readable drive, but no idea how i do this on a mac.
the thing that is fucked is that the drive has a virus, and once plugged into my pc it transfered the virus....so i unplugged it and i just want to back it up to dvd via my mac...but now i'm stuck : \
help? thoughts? anything? thanks.
- ninjasavant0
Disk Utility in you Applications>Utilities folder. The device should show up in the list on the left and you should have the option to mount or unmount it. If it doesn't show up in that list then it may have a corrupted boot sector and would be in need of a good reformatting. Hope you backed it up.
- Corrupted boot sector? You mean partition table?.. boot sectors are for booting..kalkal
- lvl_130
thanks ninja. it's spinning right now.....found it.
so now what? run first aid?
i don't want to wipe it as i know there is some stuff on there that i do not have backed up, so what are my options here?
- fodcj0
Hey Ninja, got a question as the same has happened to me:
'If it doesn't show up in that list then it may have a corrupted boot sector and would be in need of a good reformatting'
How do you reformat something you can see of access?
- lvl_130
jumpup
- ninjasavant0
Do you have antivirus running on your PC? If not go get the AVG free antivirus software and see if you can solve that problem. At that point you should be able to back up your data and reformat it using the PC if it does in fact show up there.
From the mac side of things, you should be able to click on the drive or the partition listed beneath it and click the Mount button in the toolbar which should make it show up on the desktop where you can back it up.
I have gone the route in the past of booting a windows machine to a command prompt and backing the drive up that way by doing the command line thing. That can sometimes have low level access to drives when GUI tools fail to make the connection. From the command line you can copy the files to a directory and then format it right there.
There's also some brute force tools you can get to fix your problem. Not sure whats good on PC but on the mac your best bet is usually DiskWarrior which costs a lot less than say Drive Savers.
But really your first problem is the virus. Its somewhere on the drive so even if you do back up you're likely backing up the virus as well. Fix that first if you can. Best of luck.
- lvl_130
thanks again ninja. i'll let you know how it goes.
- lvl_130
so i ran disk repair and it came back with this:
Verify and Repair disk “levelthirteen”
** /dev/disk1s1
could not read boot block (Input/output error)
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit1 non HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an erroram i fucked now?
- ninjasavant0
That looks like a corrupt boot sector which means your landing gear is down and you are approaching fucked. If you have any serious hardcore nerd friends now might be the time to call them up. Unfortunately I know how to talk the talk but when it comes to implementation I don't have the chops. Try DiskWarrior to see if you can repair the boot sector but you might be limited since its formatted fat32. This product saved my ass once when I was in a similar situation:
http://www.prosofteng.com/produc…
I think its your best bet but you'll need to run it on windows which brings us back to the virus question but you may just have to suck it up to get the data off the drive.
- lvl_130
i'm kind of think that i may have to just plug it into my pc...which sucks. damn.
although....my brother is a nerd and has helped me out before...so he may be getting a drive shipped to him haha. he's going to kill me though (he just fixed my laptop and another external drive!). I may have to ship it with a present of some sort attached :)
i'm surprised he hasn't posted in this thread already actually...
- lvl_130
and thanks again ninja :) your help is much appreciated.
- ninjasavant0
no problem, best of luck!
- sofakingbanned0
I was having similar problems last week... I downloaded disk warrior and it fixed the problem.